830 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



a last and definite stage in textual criticism. The authorities for 

 this text date from the fourth or fifth century ; so we have reproduced 

 the text as it was at that time, at least at Alexandria and Csesarea ; 

 but I cannot feel confident that only later centuries brought in 

 the corruption, whereas the first three or four still preserved and 

 transmitted the same words as had been written by the Apostles and 

 Evangelists. On the contrary, in later times the care in transcribing 

 did increase, and not diminish, as is also the case in the classical 

 Greek and Latin authors. So I think that the number of new various 

 readings which sprang up in the tenth century is much smaller than 

 that of those dating from the fifth, and that number again is very much 

 smaller than that of those produced in the second or first century. 



But I must not be long on the general aspect of textual criticism 

 in the New Testament. As for St. Mark especially, I think that there 

 was a time when that early Gospel circulated by itself, as an anonymous 

 writing on the life and death of our Lord. I freely state that the tra- 

 dition which ascribes this writing to Mark, the disciple and interpreter 

 of St. Peter, seems to me quite reliable, as it apparently goes back to 

 no less an authority than St. John himself ; but nevertheless the 

 present inscription, Kara M.apKov, cannot of course be original, but 

 the first words, EiuayyeXtov 'It^o-oG Xpto-rov, formed the only original 

 title. Nor do I take the little book for a proper literary work like 

 that of St. Luke, but for a rough draught, which we might call a 

 commentarius, or in Greek a vTro/xi'rjfji.a, as opposite to a crvyypafxfjia. 

 Now all such anonymous vTrofxvqixaTa were likely to be handled by 

 possessors and transcribers with considerable freedom, which they did 

 not allow tliemselves in the case of a proper literary work bearing the 

 name of a known author. Every possessor or transcriber — I do not 

 speak of professional scribes, but of a person who transcribed from a 

 borrowed copy a new one for his own use — might feel justified in improv- 

 ing upon the text, either by correcting bad Greek into correct or even 

 elegant Greek, or by adding something to the sense, if he possessed 

 or believed himself to possess an independent knowledge of the same 

 things, either from a written or from an oral source. This went on 

 even in later times, in the case of this Gospel as well as in those of the 

 other Gospels, inasmuch as they were freely interpolated from each 

 other. But these interpolations we are in many cases able to recog- 

 nize, and consequently to remove from our text (which has been done 

 for many, but for others still remains to be done) ; whereas for the 

 various readings dating from the earliest times, we can do little more 

 than simply acknowledge them as such. A critic must always bear 



